Atrium Amore

On not fighting the feminine urge to preserve memories in buildings 🌴

My iPhone photos do not do this justice, but trying to preserve the memory of this sacred space!

I can’t recall my very first encounter with the atrium at 60 Wall Street, but I spent nearly every afternoon there with my Highsnobiety crew in 2019. I’m not sure what possessed us to walk through the revolving doors, but when we did we were all changed forever. At the time, I didn’t even know that it was a public atrium—I just assumed we had snuck into a secret chamber that belonged to bankers. It felt like entering a portal into the postmodern ‘80s that completely removed us from our sterile work environment, if only for 60 minutes or less. While we weren’t aware of the design history, we intuitively knew that it was a special place.

After I became a regular at Black Fox Coffee—RIP to the pre-pandemic days where the nut milk was made in-house—I altered my commute so that I could take the 2/3 train directly into the Wall Street station and exit the subway from inside the atrium. It wasn’t just a routine that I strictly followed every day, but a morning ritual that made me feel connected to the neighborhood as a non-finance person working in FiDi. For me, it wasn’t just a spectacle, but a spectacular interior built with character. The atrium is one of the few places in the area that doesn’t feel creepy when it’s completely empty, but even when it’s full of people you can still share silence. (Some folks even refer to it as a slice of Miami Vice on Wall Street.) Now, the doors in the tunnel to the subway are locked, the escalators are turned off, and the shops are all shut down; it feels vacant and abandoned.

Last month, The New York Times reported that there are plans to demolish the atrium, which has been a privately owned public space since 1989. It’s located inside a 47-story skyscraper designed by the late architect Kevin Roche that used to be the headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company and Deutsche Bank. “Writing by hand in 1984, he envisioned that its atrium — complete with water cascading over rocks, mounds of greenery and plenty of seating — would be ‘well-lit, bright and cheerful,’” states Dodai Stewart. “He also planned for ‘pockets of repose and quiet — refuges from the hectic pace of daily life in the district.’”

The Department of City Planning is currently reviewing a proposition for modifying the exterior while the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission is evaluating the building and atrium as a potential landmark. Apparently, the firm leading the renovation intends to make it “column free” with “triple-height windows, a 100-foot green wall and a skylight” so that it looks like a Singapore airport instead of a Mediterranean spa in order to “accommodate a variety of top-tier tenants.” I’m totally on board for cleaning it up (and upgrading the furniture), but what could be better than this? Yesterday I ate lunch in there for old time’s sake, wondering if I would ever get the chance to do so again while it still looks exactly like this.